Theodore Rex (155 page)
Authors: Edmund Morris
Historical Note:
This brief resurgence of the Venezuela crisis provoked a purge of former von Holleben aides at the German Embassy. Albert von Quadt was recalled in mid-Feb., the chargé Baron von Ritter given just “forty-eight hours” to follow him a week later, and two other staffers reassigned. Jules Jusserand reported that they were all clearly being punished for the Kaiser’s loss of “face.” To Théophile Delcassé, 20 Mar. 1903 (JJ).
72
“I am not for”
Jusserand to Théophile Delcassé, 7 and 11 Feb. 1903 (JJ).
73
Relaxing in the
TR to James Connolly, 29 Sept. 1902 (TRP); TR,
Letters to Kermit from Theodore Roosevelt, 1902–1908
(New York, 1946), 27; Cassini,
Never a Dull Moment
, 180; Alice Roosevelt Longworth interview, 22 June 1975.
74
The Ambassador’s own
Jusserand,
What Me Befell
, 217; Jusserand to Théophile Delcassé, 11 Feb. 1903 (JJ).
75
Beaming like a
TR to Pierre W. Coubertin, 6 Oct. 1902 (TRP); TR,
Letters to Kermit
, 27; Jules Jusserand to Théophile Delcassé, 11 Feb. 1903 (JJ). Lloyd Griscom recorded another description of TR’s flooding conversational energy at this time. “He started to volley questions at me about Persia [over breakfast], but before I could answer, he launched into a monologue of the Great Empire from the rise of Genghiz Khan. He paused long enough for me to begin an account of ibex shooting, but interrupted to send for the rifle with which he had hunted in the
West; he wanted to show us the marks of a cougar’s fangs on its butt. Then suddenly he switched to Japan.…” Griscom,
Diplomatically Speaking
, 221–22.
76
Already, almost
Thorelli,
Federal Antitrust Policy
, 531; Strouse,
Morgan
, 452–53. The Expedition Act (which TR signed into law on 11 Feb. 1903) effectively fathered the Justice Department’s modern, all-powerful Antitrust Division.
77
Congressman Charles
TR to Gilson Gardner, unidentified news clip, 7 Feb. 1903, Presidential scrapbook (TRP); Thorelli,
Federal Antitrust Policy
, 548.
Chronological Note:
When Representative Littlefield’s antitrust bill first ran into trouble in the House in mid-January, Roosevelt had called a leadership conference to advance his own program (
Review of Reviews
, Feb. 1903; Johnson, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Bureau of Corporations”). He thereupon sought out the operational center between “fools” like Speaker Henderson, who opposed all business regulation, and “equally obnoxious fools” like Littlefield, who fought too hard for too much (TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 406), and coaxed both houses and both parties into acquiescence. Henderson was promised help from George Perkins in setting up a New York law practice when he retired at the end of the session. Perkins was promised an advisory role in setting up the new Bureau of Corporations. The House Judiciary and Rules Committees at once became more hospitable to White House proposals. William C. Beer to George W. Perkins, 11 Jan. 1903 (GWP);
Review of Reviews
, Feb. 1903.
78
Just behind came
TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 410, and vol. 5, 334–35; Merrill,
Republican Command
, 141–42. The bill’s extended title was added in order to win the support of congressmen from labor-intensive districts.
79
Thus, Roosevelt
George Cortelyou to Philander Knox, 2 Jan. 1903 (PCK), makes plain TR’s mistrust of the ICC as an agency too independent for his liking. Conservatives in Congress had the same feelings about TR.
80
In view of
James Garfield diary, 5 Feb. 1903 (JRG); Pringle,
Theodore Roosevelt
, 341. See also
Campaign Contributions: Testimony Before a Subcommittee of the [Senate] Committee of Privileges and Elections
. 62 Cong., 2 sess., 1913, vol. 1, 18 (hereafter
Campaign Contributions)
.
81
J. D. ROCKEFELLER
Chicago Tribune
, New York
Herald
, and
The New York Times
, 8 Feb. 1903.
82
Both impressions
Rockefeller had just given seven million dollars for tuberculosis research.
Review of Reviews
, Mar. 1903.
83
By publicizing these
TR,
Autobiography
, 445; L. White Busbey,
Uncle Joe Cannon: The Story of a Pioneer American
(New York, 1927), 222. Other news stories implicated three more lawmakers. Senators Aldrich, Allison, Hale, Hanna, Lodge, Teller, Quay, Platt (N.Y.), and Platt (Conn.) all denied having received Standard Oil telegrams, whereupon the New York
American
(12 Feb. 1903) published a facsimile of one addressed to Quay. Signed by John D. Archbold, the company’s vice president, it protested “vexatious attacks” against big business.
Chronological Note:
TR’s not-to-be-attributed release of this story to the Associated Press on Saturday evening, 7 Feb., demonstrated his instinct for weekend news. Readers of Sunday-morning spreads had plenty of time to mark, learn, and inwardly digest, before firing off letters to their congressmen. Sunday-afternoon announcements were pretty sure to end up as front-page stories, because Monday morning was usually newsless.
At the time, it was assumed that TR acted on 7 Feb. after being shown one of the Rockefeller telegrams by Henry Cabot Lodge. Actually, he had been aware of Standard Oil’s lobbying effort for at least three days (James Garfield diary, 5 Feb. 1903 [JRG]). He delayed his dramatic move until the
day the Littlefield Bill passed the House, thus “burying” it beneath his own Sunday headlines.
84
Subsequent articles
New York
American
, 12 Feb. 1903; Johnson, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Bureau of Corporations.”
85
The old tycoon
New York
World
, 12 Feb. 1903. Early on 10 Feb. Rep. Charles Littlefield had begged TR for help with his own bill, as promised. He received a cold message saying that the President now found it “unconstitutional and entirely too drastic.” Enraged, Littlefield became the only House Republican to vote against the Commerce and Labor Bill. A mere nine Democrats joined him. Thorelli,
Federal Antitrust Policy
, 548.
86
ON 8 FEBRUARY
Princeton Alumni Weekly
, 14 Feb. 1903.
87
“JUST AT PRESENT,”
TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 423.
88
Elihu Root’s long
The Army Bill became law on 14 Feb. 1903. Internal bureaucratic conflicts kept the General Staff Corps from becoming fully effective in 1910. A quarter of a century later, Newton D. Baker described it as “the outstanding contribution made by any Secretary of War since the beginning of [U.S.] history.” Leopold,
Elihu Root
, 43. See also Jessup,
Elihu Root
, vol. 1, 260ff.
89
By agreement with
Beale,
Theodore Roosevelt
, 113.
Historical Note:
With a fine disregard for the adjective
impartial
, TR chose three aggressive expansionists to be his representatives at the Alaskan Boundary Tribunal in London: Secretary of War Elihu Root and Senators Henry Cabot Lodge (R., Mass.) and George Turner (D., Wash.). The appointments were seen as deliberately provocative. Root had sent United States troops north in 1902 to secure the very frontier he would now be adjudicating. Lodge’s personal shoulder-chip, in matters to do with Great Britain and its empire, amounted to a battering ram: “I do not like to be crowded, and I especially dislike being pushed by our British brother.” Turner came from a community that had always regretted President Polk’s failure to extend the Northwestern Territory as far as “Fifty-four Forty.”
The Anglo-Canadian claim, in TR’s opinion, was “an outrage pure and simple.” His own big globe of the world (beside which he posed, in a photograph intended for immediate release) had been “made in London by mapmakers for the Admiralty,” and showed the Alaskan boundary to be precisely where the United States said it was. Since 1825, Great Britain had understood by treaty that the line ran inland from the forty-first parallel to the Portland Channel, at a distance averaging thirty miles from the coast. This seaward strip encompassed all major inlets; when Russia sold Alaska to the United States in 1867, Canada had raised no topographical objections. Only when gold was discovered in the Klondike in 1896 had she begun to regret the ceded inlets. Canada was now suggesting—demanding—that the Alaskan boundary should be measured not from the coast, but from the extremities of islands lying far out to sea. If so, Juneau, Skagway, Dyea, the much-prized Lynn Canal, and all of Glacier Bay would be Canadian.
Roosevelt was willing to grant Canada a limited amount of inlet water, according to charts drawn up by John Hay. Strategist that he was, he suspected that the Dominion’s British rulers knew their case was hopeless, and merely wanted a judicial confirmation, to quell angry local feelings. He therefore made clear to his representatives that they were not to negotiate “untenable” territorial claims, only to decide whether a boundary sanctioned by sixty years of understanding among Russia, Great Britain,
and the United States was “right in its entirety or wrong in its entirety.” This caused great resentment at the Alaska Boundary Tribunal. Shortly after negotiations began on 15 Sept. 1903, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., visited London and sent TR private word that the British Government took an “exceedingly grave” view of his inflexible attitude. Six months later, Joseph Chamberlain was still fuming. “Our cordial neutrality and sympathy in the Spanish War followed—by what? By all that happened in regard to the Alaska Arbitration, the secret history of which is not altogether pleasant reading.”
See Tyler Dennett,
John Hay: From Poetry to Politics
(New York, 1933), 357–59; Henry Cabot Lodge to Elihu Root, 27 June 1903 (ER); John Hay to Joseph H. Choate, ca. 20 Feb. 1903 (JH); TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 287;
New York Tribune
supplement, 29 Mar. 1903, p. 1; map in
Review of Reviews
, Mar. 1903; Hill,
Roosevelt and the Caribbean
, 145; TR to Elihu Root et al., 25 Mar. 1903 (ER); Holmes to TR, 11 Oct. 1903 (TRP); Chamberlain to Poultney Bigelow, 30 Apr. 1904 (PB). For more extensive discussion, see John A. Munro, ed.,
The Alaska Boundary Dispute
(Toronto, 1970); Marks,
Velvet on Iron
, 105–11; and Tilchin,
Theodore Roosevelt
, 36–48.
90
Favorable action
Miner,
Fight for the Panama Route
, 197–98. Senatorial patience with the seventy-eight-year-old Morgan was wearing thin. “Impersonating the treaty,” Mark Hanna wrote John Hay, ca. Feb. 1903, “am I not justified in killing him?” (JH).
91
Roosevelt did not
TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 427–28.
92
On Saturday
Review of Reviews
, Mar. 1903; Wiebe,
Businessmen and Reform
, 46. By midsummer, the Department of Commerce and Labor had a Washington staff of more than 1,300 and a budget of ten million dollars. George Cortelyou speech memorandum, ca. 12 Aug. 1903 (TRP).
Chronological Note:
On this weekend, TR’s houseguest, John Singer Sargent, was painting an oil portrait of the President pausing halfway down the White House stairway with his hand on a newel. The noticeable sadness in TR’s eyes may reflect the fact that his wife, even as he posed, was suffering her second miscarriage in two years. TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 428; Morris,
Edith Kermit Roosevelt
, 265.
93
As a final
The agreement protocol was signed in Washington on 13 Feb. 1903. For a brief account of the negotiations, see Gelber,
Rise of Anglo-American Friendship
, 113–25.
94
THE NEXT MORNING’S
Los Angeles Times
, 14 Feb. 1903; New York
Press
, 15 Feb. 1903.
95
“It always pays”
TR qu. in Wood,
Roosevelt As We Knew Him
, 44; TR,
Letters
, vol. 3, 450–51. See Marks,
Velvet on Iron
, 13–15, for a discussion of TR’s “gentlemanly” scruples in foreign policy.
96
It was a
Johnson, “Theodore Roosevelt and the Bureau of Corporations”; superscript on George Cortelyou memo for the President, 14 Feb. 1903 (GBC).
97
“Say what has”
TR memo, 15 Feb. 1903, and press-release draft for New York
Herald
, 16 Feb. 1903 (PCK).
98
The result was
Literary Digest
, 21 Feb. 1903.
99
Nevertheless, Roosevelt
Thorelli,
Federal Antitrust Policy
, 555–60; clip ca. Feb. 1903 in John Hay scrapbook (JH).
100
Whether this
Nearly a century later, it has so redounded. “The year 1903 is one of the most important in the annals of antitrust. In that year, the nation became conscious for the first time of a President’s taking a personal interest in the application of the law.… [His actions] unmistakably demonstrate the practicability and potentialities of large-scale and purposeful enforcement effort” (Thorelli,
Federal
Antitrust Policy
, 560). 1903 would see only eighteen new trusts formed, as opposed to sixty-three in 1902, and forty-six in 1901.
101
GEORGE BRUCE CORTELYOU
Washington
Capitol
, 21 Apr. 1900, biography file (GBC);
National Cyclopaedia of American Biography
, vol. 14; Lowry,
Washington Close-Ups
, 104, 127–28;
Review of Reviews
, Mar. 1903; George Cortelyou to R. A. Maxwell, 16 Feb. 1903 (GBC). For a later assessment, see Benjamin Temple Ford, “A Duty to Serve: The Governmental Career of George Bruce Cortelyou” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1963).